Three useful copywriting tools

Deceptively simple, incredibly useful free tool. You know those times when you’ve got a brilliant alliterative term just on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite think of the second word? ‘It begins with ‘th’ and means ‘hypothesis’… argh, what is it?’ – you can ask Onelook. I can’t quite believe that anyone’s managed to make a tool that actually does this, but there it is.

This is primarily for poets, but looking up words that rhyme can be useful for all writers at sometime or another. I’m not sure it would have managed ‘There’s a juice loose aboot this hoose” but it’s the best rhyming tool I’ve found.

Bear in mind it’s American, so sometimes it suggests rhymes that don’t work at all with an English accent.

When you really need to just focus and get the hell on with writing, this is priceless. You choose the amount of words you need to write and how long you’ve got to write them, and choose a mode. If you stop writing, there will be consequences, depending on which mode you’ve chosen. But know this: the more evil modes will actually start deleting words if you stop writing for a while. Suddenly writers’ block isn’t such a problem anymore!

Bonus tool:

When you need a really good, British online dictionary and you don’t have a subscription to the OED, you can’t go wrong with AskOxford.com.